Write Before Writing (in Only Connect, 1986)

 The problem: "We command our students to write and grow frustrated when our "bad" students hesitate, stare out the window, dawdle over blank paper, give up and say, "I can't write, while the "good" students smugly pass their papers in before the end of the period" (33)

One reason may be that few teachers have ever allowed adequate time for prewriting, that essential stage in the writing process which precedes a completed first draft. (33)

Writing teachers, however, should give careful attention to what happens between the moment the writer receives an idea or an assignment and the moment the first completed draft is begun. We need to understand, as well as we can, the complicated and intertwining processes of perception and conception through language. (33-34)

In actual practice, of course, these stages overlap and interact with one another. (34)

There is one principal negative force which keeps the writer from writing and four positive forces which help the writer move forward to a completed draft. (34)

The negative force is resistance to writing...teachers and writers too often consider resistance to writing evil, when, in fact, it is necessary. (34)

Forces for writing..."writers feel four pressures that move them forward towards the first draft (35)

1. Increasing information about the subject
2. Increasing concern for the subject
3. a waiting audience
4. an approaching deadline

The Signals Which Say "Write" 

• genre
• POV
• voice
• news
• line
• image
• pattern
• problem

We have interviews with imaginative writers about the writing process, but rarely interviews with science writers, business writers, political writers, journalists, ghost writers, legal writers, medical writers--examples of effective writers who use language to inform and persuade. I am convinced that such research would reveal that they also see patterns or gestalts which carry them from idea to draft. (42)

Our speculations make it clear that there are significant implications for the teaching of writing in a close examination of what happens between receiving an assignment or finding a subject and beginning a completed first draft (42)

• We may need to reconsider our attitude toward those who delay...
• We should force many of our glib, hair-trigger student writers to slow down
• We should allow time within the curriculum for prewriting...
• We should make our students familiar with the signals which will tell them taht they are ready to write...(42)